"Twice. He stopped me on the road, when I was coming back from Millsborough on Armistice Day. And he came to see me the day after. You remember you were astonished to find I had sent the girls to the Shepherds' dance? I did it to get them out of the way--and if you hadn't said you were going to that service I should have had to invent something to send you away." "I always thought he was in Canada?" said Janet, in bewilderment. "What did he want? Have you told Captain Ellesborough?" "No, I haven't told George. I don't know whether I shall. Roger wanted money--as usual. I gave him some." "_You gave him some! Rachel!_" "I had to--I had to buy him off. And I've seen John Dempsey also without your knowing. And I've had to bribe him too." Rachel was now sitting up, very hard and erect, her hands round her knees. Her first object seemed to be to avoid emotion, and to prevent Janet from showing any. Janet had gone very pale. The name "Dick Tanner" was drumming in her ear. "I know you can't understand me, Janet," said Rachel, after a pause, "you could never do what I've done. I dare say when you've let me tell you the story you'll not be able to forgive me. You'll think I ought never to have let you settle with me--that I told a lie when I said I wasn't a bad woman--that I've disgraced you. I hope you won't. That--that would about finish it." Her voice shook at last. Janet was speechless. But instinctively she laid a hand on Rachel's shoulder. And at the touch, in a moment, the story came out. Confused and hardly intelligible! For Rachel herself could scarcely now disentangle all the threads and motives of it. But certain things stood out--the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with Roger Delane after six months of marriage--Hyperion to a satyr; then the attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to regret, a woman's only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at least on Rachel's side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made irresistible, by the woman's pain and despair: so the tale, the common tale, ran. "I didn't love him," said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes--"I don't pretend I did. I liked him--I was awfully sorry for him--as he was for me. But--well, there it is! I went over to his house. I honestly thought his sister was there; but, above all, I wanted him to sympathize with me--and pity me--because he knew everything. And she wasn't there--and I stayed three days and nights with him. _Voilà_!"